But I am looking, tonight, at all the times my ego fucked things up for me. I’ve had doors close from time to time, without quite understanding why. I think I’m starting to figure it out.
My deal is that, on average, I am MUCH smarter than anyone else in the room, as measured by knowledge base and analytical capacity. My problem has been that people-wise, the situation was often inverted. People could and probably still can feel my impatience, even though I thought I was being good. I don’t do it on purpose, but I have never hid it well. I once literally had a boss ask the rest of the group, after I had answered what he had thought was a hard question correctly, if anyone else had an answer. I tendered my resignation a week later.
Tonight I am pondering all of this. I have clear values as a business person. I am an excellent problem solver, and my people skills, now, are on balance pretty solid. But I don’t deal well even now with what I perceive to be stupidity. It’s a major trigger for me. Both of my kids have pointed this out to me as well. This continues, even now, to create problems for me.
Everyone wants to feel smart. Even people who are not smart want to feel smart. And I think part of my unique problem is I don’t LOOK smart. It drives suits crazy sometimes, I think.
I don’t know where I’m going with all this, other than some introspection. I tried sleep once, and it had a bad outcome, so I’m having a couple, then heading back in there. I can’t fight the fight every night without booze. And that, too, is something I will reference obliquely sometimes with people, but without watching what happens to me at night, I don’t think many people without severe PTSD will really get it.
You know, really I use this blog as a counselor for myself. All most good counselors really do is listen, then say “this is what I heard”. And people are EXCITED often by this process. Nobody listens to them. They don’t know what they are saying half the time, meaning they are saying things they did not know were hiding in there. Writing things here means I am listening to myself. It costs nothing, and it probably works as well or better than having a paid-by-the-fifty-minute-hour “mental health professional” opposite me.
All this banging my head on a wall, or to take an example from the book “Gates of Fire”, this tree-fucking, is doing something useful.